Niko is a platformer from Habbo Hotel creators, Sulake.  It is worthy of comment for two reasons:  Firstly, it has some level of integration with Habbo Hotel, a hugely successful and popular virtual world that has been one of the innovators of micro transactions and secondly, it resolves a lot of problems that platform games have on a touch screen device.

The Habbo Hotel integration isn’t something I’ve been able to experience having not tried Habbo Hotel itself and whilst also being allergic to micro-transactions themselves. It is significant however that Sulake are turning their gaze to mobile devices, and monetising a mobile market is a particular challenge that is coming up fairly frequently as part of my day job.

I’m yet to make up my mind whether what Niko is doing is a clever step towards a virtual economy shared between platforms and titles, or whether it is just straight forward cross promotion.  My guess is that it’s the latter, but setting a decent foundation for the former.

Niko: Lemur. I think.

Moving away from scraping the surface of greater media implications, in terms of actual gameplay, it’s decent, playable, and a lot more enjoyable than this sort of thing is normally.  You control Niko, an odd looking cyber-lemur, who is trying to rescue his friends that have been kidnapped.  Plot wise it’s barely ground breaking, but it worked for Sonic so there’s no reason it shouldn’t work again.  You don’t need a complicated plot to set up running and jumping.

The main problem that iOS will always face as a gaming platform is the lack of buttons.  This is made doubly frustrating when it comes to something like a platformer, which requires a certain amount of dexterity as well as decent reaction times to progress.  The aforementioned Sonic for example plays terribly on iOS and I’ve played several platformers that very quickly fall into frustration as soon as there is any pressure on you.  Most of the time, they feel as if you are clutching at a regular control pad that’s coated with oil and whose buttons don’t always work, possibly upside down. Niko manages to fix this with some a simple twist to the mechanics.

Vibrant colours, good positioning of touch-screen buttons, tried and tested format. Niko does things very competently.

The jump is more than just a simple button tap, but incorporates dragging back to fire your cyber-lemur into the air, a lot like catapulting your Angry Birds across the screen, and once you hit a wall, the normal reaction is for you to stick to it, giving you enough time to react to your jump and allowing for a certain degree of sloppiness on your aiming or reactions.

Obviously this change in the jumping mechanics is going to affect the pacing.  Instead of Mario or Sonic, Niko takes its time, varying the more plodding pace with sections where you are flung through the air by springy mushroom things.  These actually make me think of the barrels in Donkey Kong Country, and in fact the pacing is not dissimilar.

Why yes, that is me flying through the air having slightly misjudged the distance to the next platform.

The style is perfectly charming.  I like the Niko character sprite, and were I a little younger the design would definitely appeal to me a lot more.  It’s smart and polished and there’s very little to criticise.  The only thing I’m not terribly fond of is the noise the little lemur thing makes when he’s about to jump as it does make me think he’s in just a small amount of pain or about to throw up.  The music also loops with a fraction of a second gap which I find incredibly jarring, although it redeems itself by being perfectly catchy-yet-not-annoying whilst building to a descent crescendo before it loops.

There are few rough edges here.  What Niko does right should be written down and passed around among other developers who are thinking of making a platformer with a touch screen interface.  At the same time it’s still difficult to fully recommend or rave about.  The title is free, but it’s little more than a demo without putting down the £1.50 to unlock further levels.  Just writing that out makes me feel ridiculous: A lot of time and effort has gone into this to make it a decent and playable game, yet I’m reluctant to pay £1.50, and I’m not completely sure why.  I think it might be my inherrant suspicious nature when it comes to small bits of money leaving my account, but it could also be because whilst I enjoyed the handful of levels I was given for free, there was nothing there that made me desperate to see what more it had to offer.

Niko apparently bitten by a radioactive spider at some point in his past. Good design decision.

Maybe Niko caught me at a bad time, maybe I’ve played all the platformers I’m likely to rave about, or maybe that first free world was enough to feel like a small micro-game; small yet perfectly formed.  Regardless, Niko is worth a look, is well made and you might find something there that you could invest in further.

Verdict: Pretty good, free demo, some spectacular design decisions

A Twitter campaign run by McDonald’s got a little out of hand a few days ago.  The fast food chain promoted two tweets with two hashtags encouraging tweeters to 1) learn about the McDonald’s supply chain with #meetthefarmers and 2) share their stories about their McDonald’s experiences with #McDStories.

The meet the farmers hashtag was doomed to mediocrity from conception.  It’s a nice idea and apparently did quite well, but isn’t going to engage mass audiences.  Besides, as soon as you give most people the word ‘farmer’, they instantly translate it into a West Country accent.  When I used to tell people I went to Farmor’s School, you could see them doing it in their heads.

The second hashtag however was just plain doomed from conception.  If you’ve spent any amount of time in the real world, or indeed on Twitter, you don’t need any marketing training or experience to know where the #McDStories was going to go.  Instead of the warm and fuzzy “I’m Lovin’ It” tweets they were apparently expecting, the hashtag very quickly filled up with horror stories and general bile directed towards the golden arches.  The promoted tweet was pulled after a couple of hours when they saw how their social marketing audience had turned.

This incident was reported just about everywhere and heralded as one of the first social media marketing gaffs of the year.  I can’t help feeling however that there’s something more to it.

I think McDonald’s got a lot of mileage out of that one promoted tweet.

Promotion, brand awareness and marketing in general is a lot more insidious than getting people to say they think you’ve got a good product, or to express their adoration for your company.  For proof of this, see all the companies out there that get a Facebook page, get as many people to ‘Like’ it as they can and then have no way of following it up afterwards.  There’s more nuance to it than that.  It’s not enough for someone to like you, they have to buy you.

Two days ago, the press jumped on the McDonald’s Twitter campaign to lambaste it as a ‘McFail’, a disaster, a cataclysmic gaff or  an example of the dangers of marketing in social media.  To cut a long list of publications short, it got the sort of coverage a PR would kill for.

There is the old adage of all publicity is good publicity, but that just isn’t true – publicity in the age of social and viral media can murder a reputation overnight – but this isn’t exactly a reputation being destroyed.  The chain hasn’t just tipped its hand to expose a seething underbelly of contempt directed towards them: The fact that people don’t like McDonald’s is not news and it won’t be news to those in charge of their marketing department either.

McDonald’s is another one of those things like Justin Bieber that seems to be universally despised yet hugely successful at the same time.  Almost everyone says they hate McDonald’s, yet almost everyone will eat there occasionally.  Some of the tweets from the other day said things along the lines of “every time I eat there I feel sick or worse” to which the sane response is “perhaps you should stop eating there”.

What the Twitter campaign did was put the thought of McDonald’s in everyone’s heads at once, possibly making them reflect on burgers they have eaten, and even if they were in many cases negative experiences, that’s better than a million television adverts, billboards or marketers standing on street corners with megaphones shouting “EAT AT MCDONALD’S” all day, because it got people thinking the chain all by themselves.  I would put money on the fact that I wasn’t the only person inexplicably wanting a Big Mac yesterday.

Much as we’d like to believe it, those responsible for the McDonald’s marketing campaigns are not idiots.  It’s a pretty big company and they can afford people that know what they’re doing.  It really isn’t a secret that their slogan “I’m Lovin’ It” isn’t exactly universal sentiment towards the chain.  I suppose “I’m Eatin’ It” might be more appropriate.

They don’t want to make you like them, they want you to eat at their restaurants.  They want you to think of them the next time you’re hungry.  They want you to remember that one time that you actually got the Happy Meal Toy you were after when you were a child, even if it did break after three seconds.  They want you to think of the overly processed yet oddly comforting taste.  They’re almost encouraging you to think of it as a guilty pleasure:  The sort of thing you’ll never admit to your closest friends, but when no-one is watching you will hungrily long for and consume.

I think the press have been played on this one (and I fully admit that I’m a part of that - I wrote a news item about it too) and used for free advertising.  For all the statements of “It didn’t got to plan” from McDonald’s social media director Rick Wion, I think there’s something that he’s not saying.  I can’t help suspecting that #McDStories exceeded expectations.

This is composed of games I have been able to play this year and despite doing quite a bit of work in the gaming press itself, that has been less than I would have liked due to 2011 being a really busy year for me.  I’m sure there are many other games worthy of inclusion, but I just haven’t played them and won’t pretend that I have.  That’s integrity for you.

5.  Terraria

I like Minecraft, so I’m going to like Minecraft in 2D.  I did eventually tire of Terraria because I didn’t get quite such a thrill out of exploration as I would have liked, but it’s still somewhere that I go back to every now and then.  It has its quirks, but these just separate it from the 2D Minecraft clone it could have been without them.  Well worth a look and a decent challenge for anyone that delves a little deeper.

4.  Frozen Synapse

This year I’ve started to rediscover strategy games a little more and I finally got around to sinking a little time into the original XCOM as it was on my to play list and I’ve been reading about an imminent remake due for this year.  The precursor to this rediscovery is Frozen Synapse, a turn based strategy with an interesting twist.  Player’s turns resolve simultaneously.

The only thing I wish it did differently is making me feel like I had anything to do with winning a match.  I’m awful at the thing, but I suspect everyone is and sooner or later, everyone gets a break and ends up cleaning up.

A spectacular idea executed brilliantly.  A good one for strategy nuts and anyone with a little patience.

3.  Dark Souls

The game that made me want to turn it into a frisbee.  I have sunk more hours into Dark Souls than I care to admit and not got half as far as I probably should have.  This game likes to throw one challenge at you after another and has a reputation for being punishingly difficult.  Don’t let that reputation put you off too much though as the difficulty never feels cheap with every mistake you make being entirely your fault.

I actually took the warnings to heart a little too much, which meant I psyched myself up for a near-impossible gaming experience, only to be battered around by the tutorial, facing off against an obese and irritable demon with little more than a rusty butter knife, and having been told so many tales of its difficulty, it didn’t occur to me that you had to run away from that one.

Keep your wits about you and maybe think about insuring anything valuable around your gaming area and Dark Souls could be your next favourite game.

2.  Skyrim / Portal 2

I know I am completely cheating with this, but I loved Skyrim and I loved Portal 2 and either one is truly worthy of taking the top slot, but the thing is, I’ve played them both already.  I loved Skyrim when I played it in the guise of Morrowind and really, Portal 2 isn’t all that different from the original Portal either.

Skyrim let me roam around a stunning landscape that made me feel immersed enough for me to want to nudge the heating up a little and then threw some dragons at me to liven the pace up.  Portal 2 let me solve a series of lateral thinking puzzles by opening doors in the walls and the floors and the ceilings with a portal creation gun.

Both have done tremendous things with their worlds, and with polishing the experience and maybe it’s a bit unfair to say they are the same experiences as before as iteration is after all what a lot of software design is about, with games being no different, but at their core, they are still the same games.  It’s worth noting that these are both sequels and I tend to be a little twitchy with sequels, and they are both worthy of being at the top of anyone’s list.

1.  The Binding of Isaac

If you are an avid gamer and you have missed this one, fix that.  If you are not an avid gamer, you could do worse than trying this.  The humour and aesthetic are not for the faint of heart but the simplistic yet deep gameplay has kept me playing for hours and inspires the “just one more game and maybe I can still catch my train if I run” vibe that truly great games do.

A simple rogue-like on the surface, every play through will be different and having played the thing to death, I’m still discovering new items and power ups long after most games would have surrendered their secrets.  It has gone from making me a little queasy and repulsed to making me laugh at little unexpected moments and growl in frustration whenever I mess up.  A perfect gamer’s game with a difficulty curve that seems to match the player.

Honourable mentions:

Minecraft would be on this list because it was technically released in November, but it has also been released in a state that isn’t all that different from the finished product for a lot longer than that.  If you haven’t played Minecraft then I would like to be the first to welcome you back from your stay on the Moon, and introduce you to a genre breaking industry shaking title that could change your life.  And if it doesn’t change it, it will at least probably take some of it, but in a good way.

APB: Reloaded is a curious beast because I can’t quite work out when it was released and I just don’t know how different it is from the original release.  A cops and robbers MMO that is best described as GTA online, the production was deeply troubled with developers Realtime Worlds going under and the game having an uncertain future shortly after release.  The title was then snapped up by Gamers First and released as a Free To Play game and should be tried by everyone.  It seems odd at first, but once you get the hang of how it works, it is a fantastically fluid and dynamic constant PvP-fest with what I consider to be near flawless matchmaking and pacing.

I also feel there are a couple of games that got a bit of a raw deal in the gaming press this year.  Space Marine was a lot better than people gave credit for and more people should have probably tried Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, just because both games were fairly solid and entertaining and were trying something a bit different.  Ok so they were both third person shooters, but one got rid of cover mechanics by making you into a walking wall and the other set it in a brown-and-muddy fantasy setting instead of brown-and-muddy sci-fi setting.  Maybe not exactly enough to call innovation, but certainly enough to appreciate on some level.

The next thing to do would be to say what my most anticipated games of 2012 are, but I have such a huge backlog of games on my to-play list that haven’t reached their magical “you can’t play this any more” sell-by-date that instead, I’m going to play a few more from 2011 first.

It’s probably the same reason I strongly dislike Valentine’s day.  Someone can be a filthy scum-weasel to their significant other all year round and get a free pass if they take them to Paris on Februrary 14th.  Similar with “Christmas spirit” (as in good cheer, not drinking before noon), you should be a good and cheerful person all year round, not just when the world tells you to buy a few cards and presents.

With that being said, with 2012 rolling around, it got me thinking about what I would like to change about myself.  I considered that maybe doing a bit of exercise might be a good idea, drinking less would also be good and possibly being a little more generally organised in terms of diet and lifestyle, but to be honest I’m in a good place with all of that.  The thing that I really want to change is my attitude towards things.  It’s not that I have a particularly bad attitude towards life in general and I consider myself optimistic and irritatingly chirpy at times, but when it comes to media and entertainment, I have been passively brainwashed to hate and despise everything without giving it a fair chance.

Cynicism is cool.  Slamming something is the new clever thing to do.  Being critical and negative is not necessarily easier than being positive, but it is far more entertaining for both reader and writer.  In terms of reviews, negative reviews are just more popular and allow a writer a greater opportunity to be witty and have a little fun with their turn of phrase.  I’m not saying that everything should be positive and that everyone should praise everything that gets made – that would after all lead to bad things doing well and getting made over and over again – but things should be given a better chance.  Too many products have not been given a fair chance and been consigned to the oblivion of negativity when actually there were some great aspects to them.

It takes ages to make things. The time that went into drawing this collection of my comics characters is a huge amount of time compared to the amount of time you will spend looking at it. That's always the way with anything entertainment related.

This year, I intend to get into the habit of trying to see the best in everything, be it film, book, comic, game, TV show or otherwise.  I have had first hand experience now at how much time and effort goes in to making all of those things, so it’s horrible to think that all that hard work can be crushed by a single review that took a tiny fraction of the time to throw together.

I’m not even saying that in the past I’ve been overly harsh on things.  All of my reviews at Bit-Tech were positive if not necessarily particularly high scoring because everything I played I truly enjoyed.  I wasn’t being bought off by publishers, there wasn’t an editorial command saying I had to give something a good review, I just genuinely enjoyed everything I played on some level.  I think the only review that approached a negative outcome was From Dust, but that still had many redeeming points.  Despite this, I still have a snap reaction to say “oh that’s rubbish!” about certain things only to later realise that I have never actually seen said thing and am parroting a review or sentiment I’ve picked up from somewhere else, and I’m sick of falling into that trap.  I’m sick of passing judgment on something I have no knowledge about and I know it’s not just me that does it.

As an example, a couple of nights ago I refused to watch Signs because it was a terrible film, only to think for a moment and realise that I’d never actually seen it.  After watching it, I was shocked to see that it was actually quite an interesting film.  Not great and not without its problems, but still good and definitely not terrible.

There are films that I like that I feel I shouldn’t like, games I enjoy that others detest, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that anymore.  If I like something, I’m going to say “I like that” and give a reason why.

I liked Signs because it had a ground level view of a large scale alien invasion to the point that you only saw it happening through the eyes of a family trapped in a basement.  I liked X Men Origins: Wolverine because it had a beautiful opening sequence and a decent character relationship between Logan and Sabretooth.  I liked the first Transformers film because it entertained me and had some excellent action set-pieces, even if the camera moves are shaking all over the place.  I liked the Street Fighter film because Raul Julia’s M.Bison is just so much fun to watch.

There are lots of things I shouldn’t like, so I’m going to spend 2012 finding things that I think I don’t like and putting myself right.  The world is full of negativity and nay-saying and people just stopping themselves from enjoying life.  Not to sound like a Hallmark card, but I’m cutting that out of my life right now.  Cynicism is a brilliant tool to protect you from dross and entertainment that will probably rot your brain, but I and most of the world have taken it too far.  It’s time to offer constructive criticism and to say what you do like instead of what you don’t.

Short version:  I’m glad I kept on playing.

Long version:  Hit the ‘read the rest of this entry’ button to read on.

Saints Row: The Third sees the Third Street Saints gang elevated to the status of media icons in what I consider to be pretty decent satire whilst explaining how they get away with what they do.  With an iron grip over Stillwater, they are caught up in a larger mob war with neighbouring Steelport after a bank heist goes wrong and must build their way up to get vengeance, respect and all that jazz.  The story is fairly straight forward with fewer twists and surprises than I’d like to see, considering the previous games were actually capable of some decent story telling, but it’s functional, the dialogue didn’t make me roll my eyes too much and I actually quite liked most of the characters.

The reason I almost gave up on the game altogether though was that the first part of the game was filled with a certain degree of vile crassness that made me feel uncomfortable and a little ashamed to be such a vehement defender of video games.  I did however find that this eventually went away and was consigned to an unpleasant memory of the earlier parts of the game.

The one in the middle is the player, who will never normally look as coordinated as this and will instead be wearing a top hat, goggles, a cat-backpack and no trousers.

The problem is that Saints Row: The Third tries to do everything, all the time, at once.  While it’s trying its level best to up the ante on every aspect of open world sandbox games of its ilk, you can’t avoid the problem that if you’re given everything, chances are you’re not going to like all of it.  The offending first third of the game is misogynistic, objectifying and vile in a way that I can only envisage particularly depraved 14 year olds finding funny.  I’m all for listening to that inner adolescent (see my opinions on the Warhammer 40,000 franchise) but in this case, it’s a mentality that I was never in possession of.

That said, it is my responsibility to state that if you find exaggerated rubber sex toys that are wielded like a claymore funny that 1) you will find the parts of Saints Row: The Third that I didn’t like hilarious, and 2) I implore you to stay away from the Skyrim modding scene.

Thankfully, the recurring joke of “hey, prostitutes!  Sex trade!  Pimps!” does disappear, which makes me feel a little sorry for the demographic that it will have hooked in when it switches it out for rule-of-cool over-the-top absurd action and borderline 50s B-movie style sci-fi.

For me, when this switch came along I could start enjoying the game again.  Something that will have frustrated a lot of open-world-sandbox-game players in the past is the effort that you have to go through to get the really amazing hardware, particularly of the airborne variety.  Fairly early on, Saints Row: The Thrid gives you a jet/helicopter/awesomeness hybrid that is from then on accessible from your HQ whenever you need it, and is possibly the best thing I have ever driven around in an open world sandbox-like game.  For me, you could have just made the game about flying this thing and it would have made me happy.

I have taken to calling this the 'developers saving throw'.

There are some exceptionally good things about Saints Row: The Third.  They have tidied up a lot of weird conventions of the genre, for example streamlining the way you get missions through your phone as opposed to having to slog away to a specific part of the city.  With this comes the slight downside that I feel less invested in the city and the area.  After playing through the GTA series and even the previous Saints Row games, I have found myself becoming familiar with the city layouts (I was a particularly successful taxi driver in Vice City) whereas with Saints Row: The Third, I was never forced to drive over the same roads enough to learn the city, and considering I spent a lot of the second half of the game flying over the city at speed, trying to dive under bridges without ploughing into the water with my jet/copter/awesome thing, I never felt I truly knew my way around the city.  This is a good and bad thing really and I still think the mission delivery system is a stroke of genius.

A second stroke of genius is that at various points during the game you are given a choice of how you end a certain mission, and what you chose will affect your game from there on.  There’s also two alternate endings, and depending on which one you pick, you are given the choice to play the other one afterwards, meaning you don’t have to replay through the whole thing or go back to an earlier save or anything like that.  The best thing about the choices is that they aren’t cartoonish kill-the-puppy/keep-the-puppy moral choices (everything you do in the game is gloriously immoral) but straight forward choices that even border on making sense.

The set pieces are great and as long as you don’t find yourself having to repeat sections again and again, they can be highly entertaining.  Falling through the air to try and catch up with a parachute and a fellow gang member whilst fighting off other falling enemies, only to break off again when you succeed to jump through the windscreen of a nearby enemy plane and then do it all again was a particularly good introduction to the game. Finding myself ringside at a wrestling match with a chainsaw fighting off waves of luchadores with the Rocky theme playing in the background also felt absurdly funny and diving into a Tron-like virtual reality did wonders to break up the pace.  Unfortunately, there are missions that offset this variety by being tedious slogs through corridors filled with mooks that take about twenty more bullets to kill than I’d be happy with, and woe betide you if you thought paying to level up your guns wasn’t necessary.  That said, the missions didn’t ever really become ‘go-here-do-this-go-here-again’ routines and were pleasantly engaging, even when there were repetitive sections.

You've got to feel sorry for the authorities, but it's hard to when you're actually driving the tank.

There are also far too many ideas in here.  I love what they’ve been trying to achieve, but they haven’t fleshed out enough of the areas to make it satisfying.  There’s a weird zombie thing that comes out of nowhere, and I realise now that the identity of the mayor of Steelport was probably meant to be a long running joke, but it’s introduced and paid off far too quickly.  Plus, the fact that it’s Burt Reynolds (the) would have been a funny reveal and was allegedly embargoed content, despite the fact I saw it on a trailer in a pub the week before I even had the game in front of me.

Little touches that have been present in previous iterations are here again with character customisation being ridiculous.  I haven’t played any other game as a cross between a young Richard Branson and the Silver Surfer, and thanks to Saints Row: The Third I have, although his voice did occasionally turn into Christian Bale’s gravel-gargling Batman, which was weird.

I’ve also only really started picking up on this recently, but the sound design is really solid as well.  A lot of places will never mention it, but the piercing beep of your laser rifle recharging for example, or the Transformers-style robotic grinding noise that your jet/copter/awesome thing makes when you switch between modes as well as the more mundane weaponry and vehicle noises gives everything a decent weight behind it thanks to these effects.  The tone of the game is also beautifully complimented by the sound track, both inside and outside of the car radios.  Some missions have a particular track linked to them which in the case of the last mission is actually hilarious.

The stylistic direction has given the Saints Row developers a lot of freedom in what they put in the game.

Saints Row: The Third is the very worst and the very best open world sandbox game that I have ever played.  It has elements that drag the whole medium into the gutter, it has elements where it has taken something that someone else has done with subtlety and blown it out of proportion to the point that it’s just unpleasant, and it has elements where it has taken something that someone else has done with subtlety and blown it out of proportion to the point that it is the most fun you are likely to have.  It’s loud, it’s crass, it’s immature, but where it works it really works.

I feel Saints Row 2 took everyone by surprise by appearing to offer tedious hardcore gangster rap and then giving you the option to play through it as a cockney super-villain reliving his favourite scenes from Clockwork Orange.  There’s nothing as surprising here with Saints Row: The Third, and there are large parts of this review that I could have written before even playing the game, but it’s hard not to recommend this to anyone that fondly remembers the earlier and more arcadey Grand Theft Auto games.  If the Grand Theft Auto series is to be seen as Scarface, then Saints Row: The Thrid is Tom and Jerry.  But who doesn’t like Tom and Jerry? A little high octane cartoon violence is necessary every now and then.

Saints Row: The Third, developed by Volition and published by THQ, was played to completion on the Playstation 3, although being an open world sandbox game, there is indeed still much more to do.  It is also available on Xbox 360 and PC.

As I’ve started going for a few sub-editing jobs, I also thought I’d practise my pun headlines…

 I know the plan was to look at some more genres, but a good plan is a plan that can change and something more interesting came up!

 Apologies for the sound and lighting.  I’m very much learning by doing, or at least learning by making mistakes and seeing what I can get away with.

 As a brief background to anyone who has missed the mess, Eurogamer gave Uncharted 3 an 8/10 score and were internet-crucified by a series of commenters claiming that Eurogamer were attention seeking, trying to get extra hits, and generally saying that they were wrong and irresponsible to give it any less than a 9/10.  Incidentally, most of these often incredibly harsh and unrepeatable-before-the-watershed comments will have come from people who hadn’t played the game yet.

That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but then I could chalk that up to the fact that I barely understand the desire to leave comments in general. I do however think it’s fair to say however that it’s insane and sadly not existing in a vacuum.  The issue has been discussed and dissected in other places, most recently by Jim Sterling at the Escapist and by Checkpoint on PATV a while back, both worth a look if you are equally perplexed about the issue.

Game journalists complaining about game journalism is actually becoming a bit of a cliché now and is nothing new.  The complaining about review scores has been bubbling away for ages.  One of the main issues is the conflict of interest that can arise in the course of the symbiotic relationship between PR and journalist with the PRs under no obligation to send review copies of games and journalists needing copies of games in order to review them and maintain a readership. I’m sure most establishments could afford to arrange a game-buying budget to circumvent this but regardless, it can make it a little awkward when it comes to reviewing an absolute stinker.

This is nothing new and in my mind review scores have always been a bit dodgy.  Before I was quite so plugged in to the gaming media, I would occasionally see a game, check for a review online, see that it scored around 7/10 and assuming that meant it would probably be ok buy the game.  More often than not, it turned out to be an awful buggy piece of rubbish.  From what I could tell, a 7/10 loosely translated as ‘this game isn’t very good but we don’t want to upset the publisher in case they don’t give us any more games to review’ and anything higher tended to mean that it was actually genuinely ok.

As a reviewer, it can be difficult to assign an arbitrary number to a game.  I struggled with it at Bit-Tech, often feeling it diminished the prose I had written (although at least they do issue scores outside of the 7-10 range) and I won’t do it on this site for my reviews.  I prefer qualitative content for opinion pieces about things that are subjectively assessed.  Although there’s an argument to say that a lot of game design is either good or bad, these reviews aren’t generally of that nature and the academic level discussions over a game’s performance is usually reserved for the more B2B-centric publications such as Gamasutra or Game Developer.

Some sites do shy away from a numbering system.  Rock Paper Shotgun are pretty much a poster child for longer and involved opinion pieces instead of dry reviews.  There’s also a lot of ire towards Kotaku for some of the questionable things they post, but at least their reviews are focussed on what they liked and didn’t like without a simple number to sum it up.  I have a copy of Saints Row the Third on its way to me to review and I just can not imagine trying to sum up the experience of a Saints Row game that bears any resemblance to its predecessor in a number.  I don’t really see how you can review anything that isn’t a list of right or wrong answers as a numbered score.  I’m still not sure how you mark a humanities essay with a percentage.

Even if you do accept the scoring system, which it looks like we’re probably stuck with, I’m staggered that an 8/10 is considered a bad score by anyone.  Is this an educational problem where people don’t realise that equates to 80%?  Is it an issue of media overload where the market has become so saturated with wonder and amazement that with so much competing for your wallet and your time people have come to expect only absolute perfection?  Actually, that’s not even the issue:  This isn’t even people being put off by an 8/10 score and not buying a game, this is people complaining that a game they want to buy got an 8/10 score before they’ve bought and played it in some attempt to justify that their time and money is going on something that is perfectly formed.  Actually, you know what, I don’t even know what this is.

I can only imagine it’s an expectation thing and all down to the way some people’s minds are wired up.  I’m staggered to hear slurred-worded inarticulate trying-too-hard-to-impress-each-other teenage boys in the cinema behind me commenting after the trailers ‘why would you want to see it in 2D if it’s in 3D?’ and it just highlights different tastes and expectations.  There’s all matter of opinions that I don’t agree with and just because some of them are wrong doesn’t mean people don’t have them and doesn’t mean people can’t be happy with them.  If gamers expect an 8-10 system where 8 means bad and 10 means ‘yes ok you can buy this now’ then that’s probably what they’ll get and those that don’t want that will just tune out, or establish a splinter element of the games press, or just ignore it all together.

I can see review scores eventually boiling down to a binary tick cross system, or possibly even a buy-it skip-it maybe-it recommendation, both of which lose a certain amount of nuance and depth, but are probably about as helpful as the current system.

I like reading game reviews.  I often find my opinion of something alters after I’ve read a review which worries me slightly, but most of the time I just like hearing someone else’s opinion on something, even if I haven’t played it yet.  As far as consumer advice goes, in recent memory I’ve only been persuaded to buy one game (Dark Souls) on the basis of a review, but that’s because I sub-edited the copy and was sat opposite the reviewer who throughout the working day periodically stopped what he was doing, stared into the middle distance and started talking about how good it was, which is generally a good sign.  A number doesn’t help.  A number isn’t really interesting.  A score out of 10 or a percentage really doesn’t tell me much.

The review score controversy, like the PR/Journalist relationship and press release churnalism issue will probably never go away.  All of it is probably a by-product of the modern aspects of journalism that have been brought into being by the internet and most of all by letting anyone have their say, forever changing the reader/writer relationship.

I suppose the real thing that I wish people would take away from this is that more people should shut up and listen occasionally instead of having their say.

Oh, and there’s no video in this post.  So you”re ok with this one.  You can stay where you are.

From my two episodes I have about half an hour of film that I’ve scrubbed through of me messing up and getting things just slightly wrong.  If you want an exercise in maintaining self confidence, or if you just want to see how long it will take for you to want to punch yourself in the face, film yourself making endless little mistakes and then sort through it.

Oh, also, the music:  That’s completely my music!  I made that this morning!  I’m oddly proud!  Exclamation mark proud!